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September 19, 2005

Plaguelands..

Apparently there's a plague spreading in World of Warcraft. I can't verify this because I'm back at 30,000 feet (bought a Flight Duration pass for thirty bucks, then promptly realised there's no plugging-in to be had in Economy, and Business is full. Scruffs like me not allowed in.)From Shacknews forums:

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul'Gurub. Inside is
the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff
called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and
affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought
this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the
instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including
npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad
that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague (and
anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). GM's even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarantine and infecting other players.

Pretty interesting stuff! Imagine all the context this kind of thing could be used for.. I wonder how serious the consequences of contracting it are? And are there rats? Pyres? Facemasks?

Comments

Apparently it is true...the EU version has experienced it - infection is brief: 200 - 245 damage per second for 3 seconds... Lethal for players 1-20...a pain in the proverbial for higher players. For hunters it bounces back and forth between them and their pet - unless they put distance between them and their pet.

Brief outbreak on Skullcrusher over the weekend...so far that's about it...

No sign of a cure though - apparently standard 'remove curse' etc won't work, and a healer trying to 'debuff' the infected will himself become infected.

Sounds like they just need a cooldown on recatching it of like 10 seconds... That way it could still make it's rounds and even reinfect people in high concentration areas, but eliminate such things as the hunter/pet bounce and npc's giving it back and forth to each other.

It's a bug. This was the main reason for the rolling resets recently, they attempted a fix but they didn't get it right and apparently still spreads around.

I play on Blackrock, one of the highly populated servers, and while I'd probably be annoyed if it killed me my character is strong enough that it doesn't... I find it hilarious.

The debuff does ~200 dmg a second for 5 seconds. It also stacks which is how players can die so quickly. This is how it's spreading to town:
* Player with pet notices pet has debuff
* Player dismisses pet
* Player goes to town and summons pet, which keeps all debuffs (this is by design)
* Due to the population of some servers and the fact that NPCs can be infected, the debuff keeps reinfecting players and spreading around.

On Blackrock we had a horde player that brought the the plague to Ironforge; it was killing people for 2 days straight (at which point they tried to fix it).

There is a very, very easy fix however - go into PVP mode (type /pvp) and you become immune to the debuff.

It's not really hilarious... low level characters not being able to get to the bank without a death run, the flight point wiout a death run, their mail without a death run. It's actually very tedious.

And even with a high lvl character, going afk a sec whilst flying, and coming back to find yourself dead at the griffon point is tedious too.

At least on Silvermoon, there were people pvp marked with it as well - so it spread to both pvp and non-pvp people - presumably from the same type of mean-spirited person pvp-marking themselves agains Hakkar for the purpose of getting around that lil loophole.

I didn't find it funny - I was glad I didn't have a low level character trying to function in Ironforge. I just kept away.

..I find this all utterly fascinating, and will frankly be somewhat disappointed if this turns out to have been an unforseen side-affect of the Corrupted Blood debuff. That's probably the case, but how much more interesting would it be if this were an intentional experiment by WoW's designers?

And when are the epidemiologists gonna jump onboard and begin leveraging MMO's to study viral outbreaks more accurately than mere computer simulations can model?

I'm not sure about the bug - I have to wonder whether this is a real laugh on Blizzards part. They state:

"It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results. At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future."

Now - obviously hotfix is a patch - indicating bug, but the very tone of this makes me wonder.

I dont play World of Warcraft, but I find this incredibly fascinating none the less. I agree with the others that this could serve as a tool to observe disease spread and quarentine methods. Of course unlike real life, I'm sure many players find it ammusing to purposefully spread the disease in crowded cities.

What would be interesting would be if high level healers (excuse my ignorance) would be able to vaccinate players permenantly. The healer would have to go on a perilous quest to a distant place to get the ingredients...

I hope there are more "World" events put in the game that could be used to study how large groups of people handle them and change.

Ponder this.
The reason this plague is never a big issue in WoW (it has wiped IF/Org on a couple of servers at peak time, but generally is funny and not annoying) is because it's too violent and doesn't have a dormant period. Like Ebola, it kills too quickly to carry large distances, so can't produce a massive epidemic.

This plague reminded me of one old but hilarious thing (which has been fixed since): http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=2844

My friend was over the other day, and I showed him http://www.exploitsrus.com/wow.html It is a site with cheats, bugs, dupes, etc for world of warcraft. He told me it was against the rules for wow to do this. Is this true? I am used to cheating on video games for my whole life, so I was sort of shocked to hear this.

Wait a minute, so your friend told you it was against WoW's rules for you to show him the site? Or are you stating that WoW put the site of WoW cheats up, which is against your friend's rules?

You are used to cheating on video games for your whole life, and you don't think cheating is bad? I suppose you must be used to it, seeing how you have been cheated out of an education, not to mention your girlfriend's constant cheating.

What does all this have to do with corrupted blood anyways? Did your parents also have problems with cheating?

I'm not sure what the hold-up is... maybe they have re-thought their stance on how this is going to actually make the company any money. Or perhaps their lawyers pointed out the liability of providing agents a platform to stick their feet in their mouth. Whatever it is, it's hardly something I'd claim as being "Well done".
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